


intoxicated

by rainingover



Series: young love, money talks [1]
Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Friends to Lovers, Gratuitous references to baz luhrmann dicaprio movies, Hook-Up, Hot Weather, M/M, Oral Sex, Summer, Wealth
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-13
Updated: 2020-04-13
Packaged: 2021-03-01 23:08:08
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,096
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23635087
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rainingover/pseuds/rainingover
Summary: Jaehyun has taken to turning his eyes towards the sun when he gets too tempted to watch Johnny as he pushes himself out of the pool, but the image is practically burnt into his retinas anyway.(It's a very hot summer and Jaehyun spends too much time in the company of his half-naked best friend.)
Relationships: Jung Yoonoh | Jaehyun/Suh Youngho | Johnny
Series: young love, money talks [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1744315
Comments: 101
Kudos: 688





	intoxicated

**Author's Note:**

> yes, i saw the W magazine photo & felt compelled to write summer boys johnjae. i am that predictable.

Johnny’s confidence is addictive. Jaehyun watches him move through parties like he’s walking on water—sure, arrogant, laughing at jokes he’s made himself. 

He thinks about the times in the dark when Johnny has admitted that he’s scared he won’t ever make anything out of himself because he doesn’t _need_ to. He doesn’t need to make his own money because he _is_ money. He lives and breathes his father’s chequebook, and his own house out here in the hills, purchased at twenty two, is a stark reminder. 

Sometimes, Jaehyun isn’t sure which Johnny is the most real, but he thinks he knows— sees it in genuine smiles and small gestures. As the weather gets warmer, Jaehyun spends less time at his parent’s place and more time at Johnny’s summer place, where they lie beside the pool and drink, and talk about expensive trips that they booked without checking the prices first, and it’s a comfortable arrangement, as long as Jaehyun doesn’t linger too much on how good Johnny looks as a bead of perspiration rolls down over his chest.

He’s taken to turning his eyes towards the sun when he gets too tempted to watch Johnny when he pushes himself out of the pool, but the image is practically burnt into his retinas anyway. 

  
  
  
  


They’re drunk the first time they make out. And that’s all they do—they make out in the pool behind Johnny’s summer condo, the cool water lapping at their skin a respite from the scorching heat. It’s Johnny who starts it, says something about being bored and being hot and needing a distraction from the harrowing reality that they’re out of champagne. 

Jaehyun says, “Call someone to bring some round.”

Johnny sighs dramatically, his hair falling into his face. “I can’t face entertaining anyone. I’m all out of charm. This weather is hell.”

“It’s too hot,” Jaehyun agrees. The heatwave isn’t a surprise exactly, global warming is a thing and even Jaehyun understands that the amount of private jet fuel he and Johnny use alone is clearly part of the problem. The heatwave isn’t a surprise, but still neither were prepared for how humid it would be— how sticky, how suffocating, it could be. “I can barely be bothered moving.”

“It’s too hot.” Johnny repeats. Jaehyun watches his chest rise and fall as he lays back on the sun-lounger. He looks away when Johnny sits up. “Come on, let’s swim.”

They don’t swim, though. They jump in and relish the rush of the water as they sink to the bottom, and then back up again. They surface in the middle of the pool, and Johnny laughs and says, “Fuck, doesn’t this feel better than it’s ever felt? The cold water?”

It does feel good, it feels like relief, and Jaehyun looks at Johnny with water dripping from his eyelashes, water dripping from his hair, sliding down over his broad shoulders and back into the pool where it came from. “Feels good,” he says. He isn’t sure what he’s talking about.

They float around for a while, Jaehyun closing his eyes, trying to breathe.

“Still bored though,” Johnny sighs from somewhere to his left. “Still restless.”

Jaehyun wonders if he’s reading between lines that don’t exist, but he’s sure he can feel Johnny’s eyes lingering on him as he speaks, even with his own eyes closed. There’s something intense about the way Johnny’s voice rings in his ears, an inflection that’s there on purpose, one that speaks to him on a base level, stirs something in the pit of his stomach.

When Jaehyun opens his eyes, Johnny is there, the dumb shell necklace he’s been wearing all summer pulled up against his neck like a choker. His hair is slicked right back, his face is still wet. Jaehyun thinks, _fuck_. The water doesn’t feel like relief anymore. 

“What are you doing?” Jaehyun wishes he were still wearing the sunglasses he’d left on his lounger. He swallows the lump in his throat and he can feel it all the way down his throat. His heart is beating hard in his chest, and the water feels like silk against his skin, feels like it’s enveloping him, and he wants Johnny to move closer, but he can’t vocalise that, can’t _admit_ it. He’s always wanted Johnny to move closer.

“It’s a weird kinda summer, huh?” Johnny mumbles. He moves through the water like he moves through a party (or is it the other way round? Jaehyun’s brain is hotwired and all he can think is, _this is a terrible idea_ ).

When Johnny kisses him, it’s not a soft kiss, it’s not tentative. Johnny doesn’t do anything tentatively. Jaehyun tastes chlorine mixed with champagne on Johnny’s tongue, and he opens his mouth, meets Johnny’s tongue with his own, licks into Johnny’s mouth and lets Johnny walk them both towards the edge of the pool, until Jaehyun’s back hits the tiles. 

Jaehyun makes a surprised noise against Johnny’s mouth, and Johnny presses his body close against Jaehyun’s, cages him in and sucks at Jaehyun’s bottom lip. Jaehyun can tell he’s getting hard, how could he _not_? And he kisses Johnny back hard, slides his fingers into the hair at the nape of Johnny’s neck and keeps pace with him as the sun catches them in a hot spotlight, like it’s seeking out sin and they fit the description.

It’s Johnny’s phone, with its obnoxiously loud reggaeton ringtone, that interrupts what’s happening and leaves them breathing against each other, barely able to look each other in the eye. 

Taeil and Hyuck arrive with more champagne ten minutes after, and they go back to lying in the sun, drunk and lazy, with their friends. They don’t talk about the kiss.

Jaehyun tastes Johnny in every sip of the champagne that he drinks all afternoon and into the night.

  
  
  
  
  


By the third week in July, the temperature has steadily increased day on day until it reaches unprecedented temperatures. It’s a sticky sort of heat, thick and suffocating, but addictive, and Jaehyun and Johnny lie beside the pool for days on end as other friends pop in and out, bringing alcohol, food, cigarettes and stories of their summers so far. Even Johnny, forever the enthusiastic host, seems to grow bored of the company.

It’s a little before three on a Tuesday afternoon, not that the days seem to mean anything anymore, when Johnny turns off his phone and declares a day off from life. “I don’t want them around,” he says, sipping on a glass of water— the first non-alcoholic beverage he’s had in days. “I just want to lie here and sweat.”

Jaehyun looks at his own phone. He has messages he hasn’t opened from days ago, and the truth is that he just doesn’t _care_ . He doesn’t think about much other than Johnny at the moment, and in this weather it’s all he _can_ do. It’s not like he’s thirsty, it’s more like he’s craving a particular taste, one he’s only had once, and until he tastes it again he can’t rest. 

His skin feels like flames, like he’ll never be comfortable inside it again, and when he closes his eyes he imagines the unmistakable outline of Johnny’s hardening cock that he swears he could feel against his hip when they made out in the pool that day.

“Put the lotion on my back?” Johnny asks twenty minutes later, as he rolls onto his stomach on the sun-lounger next to Jaehyun.

“What?” 

His shorts sit low over his hips, just above the swell of his ass. Johnny’s tall and he’s athletic, and Jaehyun’s thought about him like this for a while now, muscle and bare skin on show. He’s seen it a lot, but seeing it and thinking of it are very different things. You can see something and let it pass, but if you allow it to linger, to turn into deliberation, it can become so much more than that.

Jaehyun has allowed it to become more than skin and muscle and aesthetics. Now it's a desire, now it’s obsession. Maybe it’s love, he thinks. Maybe he’s in love. He can’t be sure, it’s never happened before. He thinks about licking the salt off of Johnny’s firm stomach and wants to crawl out of his own skin.

“Come over here and do my back for me,” Johnny repeats. He chucks the lotion in Jaehyun’s direction and it hits his knee. “Sorry.”

Jaehyun mutters, “Asshole,” but neither of them ever mean the things they say to each other. They’ve been friends for a long time. That’s another problem, of course. Jaehyun shouldn’t be obsessed with Johnny, because Johnny’s a _friend_ , and true friends are a rarity in their world of throwing money around like it’s nothing. 

Still, Jaehyun thinks about that kiss.

He stands over Johnny’s sunlounger and squeezes the bottle of sunscreen lotion into his palm. Squatting down, he slides his hand over Johnny’s shoulders as he tries to get a good angle to rub it into his skin. He feels awkward like this, and maybe Johnny can tell because he laughs. “What the fuck are you doing?” He turns his face and Jaehyun can see his eyelashes through the side of his sunglasses. “Get on the damn bed, you can’t do it like that.”

Jaehyun hesitates. His heart beats in his ears. Does Johnny know what he’s doing to him? He _can’t_ do, surely. 

“Right, okay.” He stands up and then steadies one knee next to Johnny on the side of the lounger, putting his weight onto it so he can climb over Johnny’s body until he’s straddling the top of his thighs. He can’t trust himself to sit down because he knows his body will betray him, so he keeps his body away from the back of Johnny’s legs and reaches forward to rub the lotion between Johnny’s shoulder blades. Johnny’s body is hot and it’s slick with sweat, and the lotion is soft against Jaehyun’s palms.

For a while he works in silence, Johnny quiet underneath him. The speakers inside the house are playing some Closing Party playlist from Ibiza the year before, and Jaehyun thinks about their month there in the villa with the sex swing, and how they’d joked about getting girls back to use it, but had ended up spending most nights falling asleep together in the master-suite and pretending it was because they were too drunk to remember which room was which. The sex swing had not been used, but both of them had lied to their friends when they’d returned home; made up girls that didn’t exist and told their sordid tales to raptured attention. 

Maybe, he thinks, the kiss hadn’t been so out of the blue at all. 

He works his hands over Johnny’s shoulders, the tops of his arms, and then down over the defined ridges of his back, dipping into his sides carefully. Johnny squirms a little underneath him then. Says, “Tickles,” and lets out a breathless sort of sound that goes straight to Jaehyun’s belly, and then lower, curling inside of him tightly. He’s getting hard, he realises, and he removes his hands.

“You stopped.” Johnny’s voice is muffled in the cushion of the lounger, but he sounds kind of sad. 

“Just—uh, I just needed more lotion,” Jaehyun excuses, and he squeezes more out, before he settles his hands back into position, working lower now, down into the dip of Johnny’s lower back. He’s definitely hard now. 

“All done,” he says, and he scrambles off the sunlounger before he loses his mind completely.

“Where are you going?” Johnny rolls onto his front. He’s quick, and Jaehyun is lightheaded, and he has his hand around Jaehyun’s wrist before Jaehyun can move away from him. “Hey.”

Jaehyun tries to tug his hand away, but he hasn’t got the energy. “I don’t…”

Johnny pushes his sunglasses up and they slide back into his damp hair. “Sit back down here,” he says, and he moves a little to the left to give Jaehyun room. Jaehyun doesn’t know why he does as Johnny suggests, but he does, and then he’s sitting at the edge of Johnny’s lounger, Johnny’s thumb at the pulsepoint on his wrist. “You’re acting weird.”

Jaehyun just looks at him. Johnny’s mouth is parted. He smells of sunscreen. “It’s a weird sort of summer,” he says, as if that’s an excuse for his behaviour.

“Yeah.” Johnny nods. There’s a look in his eyes that Jaeyhyun can’t quite put his finger on. “It’s very hot. Messes with your brain, that sort of heat,” Johnny says. Jaehyun watches his mouth form the words, and then he glances up at Johnny’s eyes and realises that Johnny’s watching his mouth too.

This time they both close the gap between them, Jaehyun leaning hungrily into Johnny’s mouth, into his firm hold on Jaehyun’s wrist. Johnny lets his wrist go to slide his hand around the back of Jaehyun’s neck instead, and then he pulls him even closer into him, until Jaehyun is practically in his lap. The pull is magnetic, and Johnny’s mouth makes quick work of setting him on fire. It feels good, the firm hand at the back of his head, the press of their chests, and then Johnny’s snaking a hand between them both and palming at the front of Jaehyun’s shorts, where he can’t deny he’s hard. He’s been hard since Johnny asked him to rub lotion on his back, for fucks sake. He’s been hard since the start of summer, since _last_ summer, he’s wanted this so much, he’s just never allowed himself to admit it.

Now he gasps into Johnny’s mouth, rolls his hips forward and moans, bares his throat for Johnny to kiss it. The scrape of teeth against the sensitive skin at this throat is a crazy feeling, fraught with a sort of excitement Jaehyun hasn’t felt in a long time. Nothing is exciting anymore, money isn’t and alcohol isn’t, and maybe this is the only way to feel a rush of blood now—to fall in love with someone you never expected to and pretend it’s only because of the humidity.

Jaehyun wants more excitement. He pulls away from Johnny’s touch, their lips separating with an obscene pop. “Want me to blow you?” he asks, all in one breath, and Johnny makes a face that’s almost _pained_ with lust.

“ _Fuck_ ,” he breathes out. He still has his hand at the back of Jaehyun’s head. “Yeah.”

Jaehyun gets on his knees on the hard, hot, patio slabs. It hurts, but he doesn’t care. Johnny relaxes his grip on Jaehyun’s neck and loosley threads his fingers into Jaehyun’s hair as Jaehyun settles, shoulders level with the lounger. Johnny shifts his body so he’s sitting with his knees either side of Jaehyun’s face, and Jaehyun thinks, _it’s so humid_ and he can feel the heat of the sun on his shoulders, relishes in it and sets his hands on Johnny’s thighs, running them up and under his shorts as high as he can reach before the material stops him while Johnny unties them and pushes them down over his hips, the fine hair that leads to his cock exposed. 

Jaehyun helps him out of the shorts, and then Johnny— his friend Johnny—is sitting in front of him naked. He doesn’t look shy about it, but Jaehyun knows him better than that. He knows that behind the confidence, Johnny would feel like absolute shit if Jaehyun left right now, but Jaehyun has no intentions of leaving. 

Johnny’s cock is thick, curved towards his stomach, precum at the head, and Jaehyun’s still hard in his shorts too, but that doesn’t matter, because he just wants to do this. He feels like he’s overcome with a kind of fever, his skin hot and his mouth dry, like he’ll die if he doesn’t get Johnny’s cock in his mouth right now. He’s never felt like this before, but it feels like it’s taking over him.

He leans down and takes the tip in his mouth, laps at the head and then dips lower, taking him fully into his mouth, all the way to the back of his throat. Johnny makes a strangled noise, tightens his grip in Jaehyun’s hair, and Jaehyun smiles against him as he pulls back a little, laps his tongue against the underside of Johnny’s cock as he sucks. He moves his head back until just the tip sits against his tongue, and looks up at Johnny. The sun behind him is blinding. Jaehyun closes his eyes and works around the head of Johnny’s cock, circling his hand around the base and stroking. Johnny’s fingers scrape at the place where Jaehyun’s hair meets bare skin at the back of his neck and he keens into it. He feels good like this, scraped knees and bare shoulders in the dense heat, with the weight of Johnny’s cock on his tongue. It feels good, it feels weird, it feels like the edge of something bigger than them both. 

“Touch yourself,” Johnny mumbles. His mouth is barely open as he speaks, his eyelids fluttering shut. He looks like a god— bronze, bathed in sunlight. “You need to get off too.”

Jaehyun slips his free hand down inside the front of his shorts and jerks himself to the rhythm he sets with the drag and pull of his mouth, hollowed cheeks, soft concentration as Johnny makes encouraging noises.

“I’m gonna—gonna come soon,” Johnny warns him, but Jaehyun does nothing about it, just continues bobbing his head, squeezing his lips tighter around Johnny and waiting to feel him coming inside his throat. He’s never been like this, this hungry, this uncontrolled. Usually he fucks like he’s trying to prove a point about his family’s money. Now he just wants to make Johnny feel weightless.

When Johnny comes it’s with a string of curse words and a low strangled groan that Jaehyun commits to memory. Johnny watches him as he stands up, puts out a hand to steady him on his sore legs.

"Weird," Johnny says, and Jaehyun wipes the back of his mouth with Johnny’s beach-towel. “I have to go home for dinner with my parents tonight,” he says. “It’s their anniversary.”

He feels like everything around him is spinning: the earth, the sky, the water in the pool. He's upside down. His shorts are sticky with his come.

Johnny says, “Right, okay,” and he lets him leave.

  
  
  
  
  


August comes and Johnny offers to host Mark’s birthday party. He goes overboard, gets in caterers and decorators, and even waiting-on staff for the occasion. “It’s the Gatsby in me,” Johnny says with a wave of his hand. He’s just fucking around, neither of them think they’re Jay Gatsby, they don’t have the interesting backstory for starters. They just grew up rich. Still, it’s the sort of comparison that makes them smile, and they raise a glass to each other from their loungers with a smile. 

The party is due to start about two and it will likely go on until the neighbors complain. They don’t complain much though, they’re never home. Everyone around here has second homes, third homes, homes from home and villas in Europe.

Sometimes it feels like it’s just the two of them in the whole neighbourhood and, honestly, Jaehyun doesn’t mind it that way. But today there is the hustle and bustle of setting up a pool-party, complete with a Champagne glass waterfall that someone is clearly going to fall into at some point before it even gets dark. 

Jaehyun sits on the queen sized sun-bed Johnny’s just had shipped in from some company that supplies the furniture to private beach clubs on the Balearic islands. The warmth soaks into his skin gorgeously and makes him feel drowsy. “How much have you spent on all of this?”

“What else is there to spend money on?” Johnny lies back in the sun next to him. His tanned skin against the pure white of the sun-bed looks almost like bronze, like if Jaehyun reached out and touched him he’d feel the sharp heat of hot metal. “This summer feels never-ending.”

“Maybe it is,” Jaehyun says. “Maybe we’re in purgatory.”

Johnny lifts the sunglasses up from his eyes and peers at Jaehyun. “It’ll be fun, this party. I promise you,” he tells him. “And you know Mark will fucking love it.”

Mark does love it— everyone does. Their friends are all carbon-copies of each other, just like they are themselves. They all have money, a reliance on alcohol and an underlying lack of self-worth, despite the way they portray themselves. They’re good people, their friends, just playing the part they were born to.

Jaehyun drinks martinis and eats canapes next to the pool, Mark blows out the candles on a ridiculously big cake, and Johnny and Yuta start a water fight that ends with an iphone at the bottom of the pool and smashed glass in the grass.

The heat of the summer is relentless, hanging over them in a thick fog, and it bleeds from day into night, humid as the party pulses on. 

Jaehyun sits at the edge of the pool as twilight hits, drinking from a bottle of Bollinger and watching Johnny in his element, surrounded by beautiful people. He thinks about the month before when Johnny had pushed him up against the tiled wall of the same pool he sits beside and kissed him hard, and then the week after that when he’d bruised his knees and swallowed his come. 

(It’s happened a few of times since, once again in the pool, Johnny’s mouth on his neck and his hand on Jaehyun’s cock under the water, and then in the kitchen, cooling off after an afternoon of blistering heat where they had traded slow, cool, kisses under the ceiling fan. Jaehyun had sucked him off again in the summerhouse a few days later, had let Johnny fuck his face until he was almost choking. Had _asked_ him to.

“It’s a weird sort of summer,” Jaehyun had said afterwards, because it’s what they say now. 

Johnny had said, “So weird,” and then had held onto his hand, neither of them saying a word about it, until Taeil had arrived with a magnum of vodka.)

“What you thinkin’ about?”

“Hmm?” When Jaehyun looks up Johnny is standing over him, half-naked, hazy eyed. Jaehyun wants to slide a hand up his thigh. “Oh, just that you were right; it’s a fun party.”

Johnny sits down next to him and takes the bottle, his neck one incredibly long curve as he tilts his head back and pours Champagne into his mouth. It runs over his lips and he licks at them carelessly. Jaehyun can’t breathe.

“Come inside,” Johnny says. “I’m gonna get on the decks. DJ my own party like the loser I am.” He grins, standing up.

When he puts out his hand, Jaehyun takes it.

Jaehyun wakes up in the summer house behind the pool the next morning to the sound of the cleaning crew who are already in to put the house and the gardens back together. Johnny is there too, which seems funny because it’s _his_ house and yet he’s passed out here like he doesn’t have his pick of every room inside. Jaehyun wakes him up with a nudge of his shoulder. “John?”

“Headache,” Johnny murmurs. Jaehyun resists the urge to kiss the side of his face softly. He climbs over Johnny and off the chaise-lounge, almost falling onto the wooden slatted floor. 

“I’ll get you an aspirin,” Jaehyun tells him, but when he heads back to the summer house with painkillers and coconut water five minutes later Johnny is already back out on the patio, sitting by the pool, dipping his tanned feet in the water. 

They watch the clean-up team work around them, the same way they watched the prep team put up a tent and set up fifty Champagne coupes twenty-four hours before. 

Johnny looks at his phone, clicks on the weather app icon. It shows endless yellow suns. “It’s getting hotter every day,” he says. “Do you think the world is ending around us?”

“Yes.” Jaehyun kicks at the water with his feet. His own skin is more tanned than it’s been any summer before, but then he spends all day in Johnny’s garden, under Johnny’s spell, so it’s not surprising. They sit in silence, sunglasses on to hide bloodshot eyes as the cleaning team coordinator shouts directions at her team. It’s like they’re invisible to the team, like they’re not people but instead just two pieces of the party that will be cleaned up by the end of the day. Jaehyun thinks that really, that’s probably what they are: waste left behind by an expensive party. 

Jaehyun looks directly at the sun. “Do you think we are wasting this summer?” he asks. 

“It’s too hot,” Johnny replies, as if that’s an answer to the question.

Maybe it is.

  
  
  
  


By the third week in August, Jaehyun is convinced that the heat is going to kill him. That’s if Johnny’s tongue doesn’t kill him first. 

“It’s a weird summer,” Johnny mumbles a little after noon, presses him down on his sun-lounger and covers Jaehyun’s body with his own hot skin. “So weird,” he mutters, and then he kisses Jaehyun until both of their mouths are swollen and sore. Then he moves his mouth over the curve of Jaehyun’s jaw, presses feverish kisses to Jaehyun’s neck, down to his collarbone. He sucks into the skin just above it, and laps at it with his tongue gently, laughs against it when Jaehyun breathes out soft curses.

The sun beats down on them, directly above their bodies, like it’s part of the whole scene. Jaehyun can see the burning orange of the sun, even with his eyes tightly closed and he dares it to explode above them and end everything. 

Johnny’s tongue is at his nipple then, sliding over the sensitive skin eagerly, while he grinds his crotch down against Jaehyun’s thigh. Everything about Johnny is white heat and fever, and Jaehyun can’t get enough of it. He pulls Johnny back up to meet his kiss, and they kiss open-mouthed and dirty, Jaehyun’s hips moving without him even thinking, meeting Johnny’s messy thrusts with a reckless sort of desperation, grinding up so he can feel the full outline of Johnny’s cock against him, his own straining tightly against his shorts as they move together. He feels the beads of sweat at Johnny’s nape, swelling on the soft hairs on his neck, and holds him as close as he can, moaning into Johnny’s shoulder when he comes.

He thinks, fuck money, fuck everything we have, all I need is _this._ But he feels stupid for it afterwards, because that isn’t how the world works, least of all _their_ world.

They swim for a while afterwards, passing by each other as they make their way in lengths across the water, and the water is a gentle relief, a balm against Jaehyun’s constant state of agitation around Johnny now. Jaehyun dips his head below the water and listens to the sound of crashing waves that aren't really there, then he stares at the bottom of the pool with chlorine-tinged eyes and thinks about holding his breath.

About six, pizza arrives, and Johnny tips the delivery guy a stupid amount of money. They sit on the kitchen floor, devouring the pizza right there, sitting in damp swim-shorts and getting the linoleum wet. 

“Stay over tonight,” Johnny says to him, and Jaehyun swallows the lump in his throat and nods silently, Johnny’s eyes on him the whole time. Johnny stretches his arms over his head and rolls his neck. “I’m going to shower,” he announces and then he walks out of the kitchen, leaving Jaehyun and the pizza box alone. 

Jaehyun texts Hyuck to let him know that he and Johnny won’t be showing up at any of the parties he’d invited them to tonight. Hyuck gets invited to every party, knows every person; he won’t miss their presence. Still, despite his privilege, Jaehyun has been brought up to be polite, so he texts a _sorry_ and waits for Johnny to call down to him that the shower is free for him to use.

When Jaehyun gets out of the shower, Johnny is dressed in slacks and an open-necked shirt, and he’s mixing a martini.

“I thought we weren’t going out,” he says before he can stop himself. Johnny’s eyes flicker to the towel at his waist and then back to his face.

“No?”

“I just… I got confused.” Jaehyun holds his towel tightly at his waist. He feels like a teenager again. He feels ridiculous. 

Johnny continues staring. “Because I asked you to stay over?”

Jaehyun feels the deep heat of embarrassment creeping up his neck. “You meant after the party.”

“Yeah.” Johnny steps away from the liquor cabinet and towards him, and Jaehyun instinctively steps backwards. “Don’t you want to see other people?”

Jaehyun blinks. Johnny’s words are layered with meaning. _No_. “I guess so,” he says. He feels lightheaded.

Johnny mixes him a drink and Jaehyun takes his pick from the clothes in Johnny’s closet. He shrugs on one of Johnny’s printed shirts, reminiscent of Venice beach in the mid 90s. He feels like a fraud, like he’s playing at being the stereotype he long ago realised feels like a costume. _Are we playing pretend?_ he wonders. _Do we think we’re characters in a play?_

When he stares into the mirror, he doesn’t look like himself.

“It’s been a weird, hot, summer,” Johnny tells Doyoung later, smoking cigars on someone else’s patio that looks like every other patio in the hills, with an identical pool and an identical air of desperation. Jaehyun throws back his drink. 

“I think the sun is playing with my mind,” he tells Mark later, drunk and sleepy on the grass. He pulls Mark down beside him and they lie shoulder to shoulder and look up at the moon. He likes the moon, Jaehyun decides. It doesn't stare at him like the sun does. “I think the summer is killing me.”

Mark pats him on the shoulder and gets up to swap his vodka for a glass of water. He calls Jaehyun a cab and Yuta helps him into it, though he's wobbly on his feet too, and he doesn’t end up staying at Johnny’s at all.

  
  
  


  
Things go back to the old normal for a while after that. Jaehyun hangs out at Johnny’s place, but they start inviting people over more again. 

Yuta loses another iPhone to the bottom of the pool and Taeil brings an endless supply of Grey Goose and, if he’s honest, Jaehyun is fucking sick of it, but then they probably all are. They just pretend to love it, to love everything about their shitty, empty lives. Johnny doesn’t kiss him, he doesn’t press him down against warm surfaces, or let Jaehyun suck him off, or any of the things Jaehyun had started to anticipate. 

It's like the summer before last, when they'd spend more time in groups and less time alone, because they hadn't figured out yet how much they craved each other's company. Except everything has changed, and when Jaehyun glances at Johnny across the fire-pit, he feels an ache in his chest that wasn't there back then, when he was oblivious. 

He stands on Johnny's balcony and watches him laughing with their friends, his head thrown back in joy.

It’s still too hot.

The storm creeps up on them one day, blue sky turning darker within minutes. Mark has flown to Maui with Yuta, and Taeil is on a boat somewhere according to Instagram, so it’s just the two of them lying on their sun-loungers, side by side, a picture of wealth. Jaehyun stares up at where the sun had been moments before, and watches the heavy looking clouds slide into place. 

“Oh,” Johnny exclaims as the first raindrop falls. “Shit.” 

They grab their phones, their watches, their clothes as the rain gets heavier, crashing against the surface of the pool like it’s trying to break through it, and they head inside, watching the scene unfold from the back of the house.

“Maybe it’s just a passing shower,” Johnny says. “And then we can go back out there.”

“I’m going out now,” Jaehyun tells him. He leaves his phone inside and steps back onto the patio. 

“Are you crazy?” Johnny’s laughing at him. “Are you serious?”

Jaehyun just shrugs and laughs back. "It's a sign," he says with a smile. "The world isn't ending after all." He’s been waiting for respite from the prickling heat, from the suffocation, and it’s here now in cool rain over his face, in diving into the water and feeling the rushing of the water past him. 

When he surfaces, Johnny is at the edge of the pool, rain-soaked and watching him.

“It’s a weird sort of summer,” Jaehyun says. It's like a mantra now, something they tell each other and themselves to cover-up the fact that everything is too intense and too good. It feels too good to be true, Jaehyun thinks.

“It’s not just the summer.” Johnny shakes his head. “It’s not the summer at all. I’ve wanted you a long time.”

 _Oh._ Jaehyun smiles at him. “Get in the water, it’s nice,” he says. His head feels clear for the first time in months, like he can see without the haze of the sun in his eyes, and this clarity only confirms what he feels for Johnny. 

“You asked if I thought we were wasting our time, our summer,” Johnny says as he swims across to meet Jaehyun in the middle of the water. “After the party, you asked me that.”

Jaehyun remembers. “And you didn’t answer me.”

“I don’t think any time with you is wasted,” Johnny admits, treading water close to him. “I’d spend an endless summer with you, just fooling around, if I could.” 

“Yeah?” Jaehyun swims closer to him, until they’re inches apart, the water lapping around them in a rhythm. The rain continues to fall, and Johnny’s eyelashes are endlessly long and dark. He licks rainwater from his upper lip. 

“Yeah.” Johnny leans in and rests his forehead against Jaehyun’s, and they stay like this a while, shallow breathing, working their mouths closer together a millimeter at a time. 

“Same,” Jaehyun whispers. 

When they kiss this time, it’s softer somehow, tentative even. Johnny doesn’t _do_ anything tentatively, Jaehyun thinks, but then while they are both used to getting what they want, this time it seems to matter more. 

They wind their arms around each other’s bodies, hold each other underneath the water and press their lips together, losing themselves in the kiss until Jaehyun realises they’re sinking, and they sink together, heads under the water, tongues sliding together as the sound of the water fills Jaehyun’s ears, until he can’t hear anything or see anything at all. All he can feel is Johnny’s mouth, Johnny’s touch. Johnny, _everywhere_. 

They end up at the edge of the pool, Johnny’s back to the tiles this time, and it continues to rain around them, turning their skin cold to the touch, not that either of them care. 

When the rain stops, they hardly notice. The sun breaks through the clouds soon after, fills the pool with a warm beam of light, and Jaehyun truly appreciates it for the first time in weeks as the heat sinks into his skin, into his bones. “Want to fuck in the summer house?” Jaehyun says through insistent kisses.

“Only if you’ll stay over afterwards.” Johnny leans down and kisses his shoulder. 

In the summer house, they fall against the sheets of the guest bed, the doors of left wide open. The smell of rain still fills the air, despite the good weather returning, and Jaehyun takes in the smell of it, the smell of Johnny's salty skin, and the sounds of his laboured breathing as they fuck. In the morning, Johnny crawls under the sheets and pulls them over their head. Says, "We're hiding from the sun for a while," and blows him to the soundtrack of morning birdsong.

It _is_ a weird kind of summer, but that’s no longer an excuse, and later as they fall asleep, hot and sticky, and breathless in the best way, Jaehyun decides that these sorts of summers are the only kind he wants.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [醉夏](https://archiveofourown.org/works/27544792) by [OceanofJade](https://archiveofourown.org/users/OceanofJade/pseuds/OceanofJade)




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